What happened during the “Java Developer Days in Athens” event

Today I attended the “Java Developer Days in Athens” event held in Athens Information Technology (AIT), along with my good friend chstath. Some from the team of speakers were familiar to the greek audience. I still remember a “colorful” presentation back in 2001-02 held at the NTUA 🙂

The facilities at AIT where excellent, the speakers where motivating and I had the opportunity to see friends, people from JHUG, former colleagues and even an old friend from the army. The turnout was massive so the participants filled a large auditorium and at least 2 classrooms that had direct video connection.

Panoramic shot of the auditorium

Most of the people stayed until almost the end of the event, which is something I’ve rarely seen.

I will try to give a short overview of this exciting event, for those that couldn’t attend.

Keynote by Reginald Hutcherson

Mentioned an array of popular organizations that are know for their large scale java deployments (yahoo, google, youtube, ebay).

The motto he repeated many times was “It’s a lifestyle”.

Gave a short description of the Web 2.0 ecology.

Spoke about the emerging concept of having one virtual machine for all languages: java, php, ruby, etc.

Said that any software tool in the future will be deployed through NetBeans.

Suggested that with open sourcing java (along with other products like OpenSolaris), SUN became one of the biggest open source contributor in the world.

Since Duke was open sourced… people are doing some strange things with it.

Every time I attend an event where the speakers come from diverse cultures, I enjoy listening to the different accents. Actually I have a very flat Greek/Spanish accent that is typical of the region I come from. Well, Doris had an intriguing oriental accent that sometimes was… funny, hence emerged the joke “I know that the oriental cuisine is one of the best in the world but… what is all that about the `sauce code`”.

Java ME for phones and devices

<At this point the coffee stopped having an effect on me due to a heavy lunch>

Solaris by Simon Ritter

Since it was a SUN event, it was expected to see something about Solaris. Although the presentation had nothing to do with Java, Simon managed to capture our attention with some cool stuff that come along with the new Solaris, like DTrace (3500 probes available also in Java).